Art Collection as a Manifesto
C.T. von Neff and his Art Collections at Piira and Muuga Manor Houses

Tiina Abel

The life of the Baltic German artist Carl Timoleon
von Neff from Estonia (1804-1876, according to the
Old Calendar) had dash and sweep. Born at the Pčssi
manor as an illegitimate son of a French governess,
Neff's career as a court painter, academic and professor
spanned the reigns of Tsars Nikolai I and
Alexander II. In St. Petersburg's high society, Neff
was primarily known as a portraitist and painter of
extremely popular bathers and nymphs. However, the
artist received official recognition, titles and orders
for religious paintings for Russian Orthodox churches.
The geographical grasp of Neff's creative activities is
reflected in paintings in St. Isaac's Cathedral, memorial
churches in Wiesbaden and Nice, a Helsinki
cathedral, the now restored Moscow Cathedral of
Christ the Redeemer, and dozens of St. Petersburg
houses of worship. The income for these commissioned
works enabled Neff, despite his enormous
workload, to travel, lead a princely life and collect art.
His life exhibited the high voltage that accompanies
creative challenges and whips up the imagination; to
maintain this level of energy, it was necessary to
establish an inspiring environment around the artist -
the Italian palazzo at Muuga, which resembles a museum,
and the park and interiors of Piira, which abound
in works of art. Timeless lofty beauty and great ideas
had to frame an everyday life full of hard work.

The most impressive part of the artist's collection
was made up of copies of famous sculptures, in expensive
materials, from different periods, such as the
Venus de Milo, the so-called Borges centaur, the
Crouching Venus, 16th century sculptor Giambologna's
Rape of the Sabine Women, August Kiss' Amazon (original
1839-1843) on the stairs of the Berlin Old
Museum, etc. Copies of Antonio Canova's lions at the
tomb of Pope Clemens XIII located at St. Peter's in
Rome, as well as St. Mary with Child by sculptor
Giovanni Vitali, who took part in building St. Isaac's
Cathedral, can now be seen at their original place in
the Muuga manor. The above-mentioned works of art
were gradually supplemented by items of applied art
and furniture in neo-styles, and over 70 paintings, the
bulk of which were copies of the works of famous
artists such as Raphael, Correggio, Poussin, Albani,
Rubens, Rembrandt, etc., painted by the Neff himself.

Neff was obviously a talented painter and a fascinating
person, whose status as an illegitimate child
shaped not only his chances in the rigid Baltic
German social realm, but also his nature. Having
been born out of wedlock, Neff was not able to rely on
the elaborate system of social connections, and his
progress, from the very start, was dependent on the
goodwill of others and, primarily, on his own efforts.
This banal inevitability seemed, either consciously or
unconsciously, to direct Neff's way of thinking and
increase his ambitions. At twenty, while a student at
the Dresden Art Academy, Neff confessed in a letter
to a friend written in December 1824: 'I cannot bear
the thought that together with my remains, also my
fame and my name will rot away and fall into oblivion.
I thus possess some pride, even more than necessary,
I fear.' A young artist who is still establishing
himself, behaves like someone who, in the apt words
of Juri Lotman, has a right to a biography. In the case
of Neff it is especially obvious how a set of chance
events was filtered through cultural codes into a programme
that then directed his behaviour. Writing a
biography did not mean choosing a mask, but assumed
an inner development, creation of a life in the direct
sense of the word, and intellectual and spiritual serenity.
Neff's developing perception of life left a miraculously
lucid imprint on the art collections at the Piira
and Muuga manorial houses. That is why they should
be seen above all as a manifesto, a grandiose manner
of self-expansion of his personality, presenting a
world-view and conquering the past. Creating
such a collection was never urged on by a smallminded
cult of things. The idea of a work of art,
its beautiful form and impeccable realisation,
were the most significant factors. Neff
knew that the art works around him
told more about their
collector than about
art, revealing not only
the owner's wealth but
also his ambitions and imagination,
familial ties and the
spirit of the era.

Neff's art collection, especially
the nature of the collection
and location in the isolation
of the two manor houses, reflect how
the artist, successfully operating in the
everyday, i.e. horizontal, dimension,
felt a need for another,
vertical, axis. 'He who
decides to dedicate himself
to art, will be
plagued with the same
gloom and misery as
lovers: cries of joy reaching the
skies, and melancholy for life,'
claimed Neff. Elsewhere he
expressed the conditions necessary
for creating art: 'You have to be
peaceful to paint, happy to
paint well, and inspired to produce
something truly extraordinary.'
Neff's biographical selfconstruction,
alas, carried with it a dramatic paradox: desiring immortality, he
did not, nevertheless, quite manage, as we now know,
to surmount the wall of obscurity. His biography was
too autobiographical, 'written' by the artist himself,
shaped without the intervention of outside energies
that refresh collective memory. It is surprisingly autobiographical,
in fact, considering his connection with
Estonia and his successful career in St. Petersburg.

Although self-portraiture is one of the key elements
in Neff's collection, his activity contains typical
features of the entire practice of 19th century collecting.
In 1851 a huge exhibition of private collections
took place at the St. Petersburg Art Academy, which
ended the era of aristocratic collectors. It was a traditional
collection of a nobleman, which contained the
obligatory portrait gallery, a library of French-language
books, West-European painting, and occasional items
of applied art and furniture, amassed over several generations.
Such a collection formed an environment of
items of a conservative family life, the value of which
was not measured by their artistic quality, but by cherished
memories. The new type of collector who
emerged during the period of change - Neff was a typical
example - accumulated his collection rapidly and
expertly and, in the process, established himself.

Beside collectors who followed clearly formulated
principles of collecting, Neff was a dilettante both in
his selection of motifs and his limited resources. On
the other hand, the lack of resemblance to a nouveau
riche private collector reveals a great deal about Neff's
personality. For Neff, acquiring works of art was not a
pastime, but a lifestyle, an organised passion, in which
free choice revealed man's true nature, turning collecting
into a form of relating to the surrounding
world. Things allegedly have their own biography and
career in culture, and in that sense a collector's mind
and heart work in close cooperation with works of art
that have the strength to respond to the voice of his
mind and heart.
Neff regarded his collection as a manifestation of
his artistic ideals. Every work of art at Muuga and Piira
acquired the status of a symbol, and related to the
artist's own field of creation. Significant notions for
the painter Neff, such as Italy, the Renaissance,
antiques, and Raphael, found their embodiment
through the activities of the collector Neff, in copies
of Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, the Venus de Milo or
Renaissance furniture. 'For him, works of art were
always the expression of the soul, and that explains
the essence of his own work as well,' wrote Mary von
Grčnewald in her memoirs about her father. Items
belonging to the collection convey the sense that the
linguistic level and tone of object-related speech are
most significant. There is no doubt that the collection
of Neff speaks in a lofty style.

Neff differs from the newly rich collectors of his
time in another aspect as well. Works of art were usually
bought for the house, rather than a house being
built for art, although new collectors all over Europe
set up buildings to function as both living quarters and
museum. They often took, as did Neff at Muuga,
Renaissance style as their model. Precisely in such an
art palace historical styles and Historicism as a world
view smoothly blended into one. The onerous appearance
of the Muuga manor confirms that Neff built it
first of all as an art temple or a museum, the most
important function seeming to be drawing the line
between two areas: interior and exterior space. The
mere comparison between the bustling St. Petersburg
and a house erected for works of art in the middle of a
marshy nowhere deepens the image that Neff saw the
latter as a convent-type refuge for meditation. The
essential task of the refuge was to be an idea-laden,
intellectually enlightened place. It was perhaps also an illusion of freedom from what lay outside its walls.
The place where Neff placed his art works can be seen
as a construed space full of yearning for identity.
When we regard an Estonian manor as a biological
residence of the Baltic Germans, and interpret it as a
landscape of resistance, the mansion and its interior
belong among the essential elements of the design of
its landscape. Works of art that surrounded Neff were
able to transcend personal experience and connect
with the outside world, and connect social experience
with the personal world; they blended into the texture
of human life, relating to the present and the past.
Although things continue to live via interpretations,
the things themselves alone have the strength to
physically carry the past into the present. An art collection
as an assemblage of items that acquired the
flavour of new cultural contexts, turned out to be orally
very effective in the space that, figuratively speaking,
lay between Neff and the things he owned. Neff
extended his self-image into that room: there took
place a dialogue between the individual and the general,
and the fruit of the conversation gave birth to
self-declaration.

Tiina Abel

(1951), art historian, Vice Director of the Art Museum of Estonia. In
2003 curated the exhibition The Artist and His Home: The Art
Collection of Carl Timoleon von Neff from Piira and Muuga manors at
Kadriorg Art Museum.